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Azzur posted:I did this awhile back, but I'm curious since we have a lot of newer readers or people who couldn't participate the first time around, so here's a little informal question: I started with the Warcraft Orcs and Humans shareware, which, if I recall correctly lets you play the first, second and fourth mission before swarming you to death with orcs. Other than that I've played all of the Warcraft games, although, admittedly I never finished Beyond the Dark Portal because it frustrated the hell out of me.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:42
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I'm a latecomer to the franchise, I started with Warcraft 3 and am still bitter over what WoW did with the night elves. My favorite race to play and my favorite race in terms of story and characters. I miss my feral amazons who could fight both the Alliance and the Horde and had no interest in joining either. Still playing WoW, still a lore buff despite myself. Alcohol is generally required at this point when dealing with WoW's lore, though among the few silver linings to the last few WoW expansions in terms of overall story is that LGBT characters have started to slowly appear in the setting.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:50
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I started out with warcraft 2 and played warcraft orcs and humans later. Got warcraft 3 when it came out and never played WoW. Sadly, I've never finished any of the games without cheating with both hands.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:53
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Azzur posted:What is your experience with the Warcraft series? So, I started out in DOS 5.0 (and quickly graduated to DOS 6.22). However, the first Warcraft game passed me by, I was more of a Dune fan. And Mechwarrior 2, for which I had created separate boot disks, seeing as they needed HiMem, EMM386 and CD drivers. Bloody memory hungry games... The first game I played of the series was Warcraft 2, and this was about the time that I'd lost all patience with trying to learn games, and wouldn't play them unless I had cheats. So, using said cheats, I'd "play" through the levels, and then sit around for story-time. I believe this was also how I played Warcraft 3 for the first time, though I did go back many years later, and played it legit. So that's okay. I don't remember much of Warcraft 2, except that I marvelled at the great audio briefings (did Dune 2 have audio briefings? I think that the first version didn't), and loved that the individual units had so many quotes. And I don't remember much of the story past "Orcs and humans are trying to kill each other". Warcraft 3, I cared about. I thought that Thrall was great, lamented that Blizzard never brought out the adventure game based on his adventures, and thought that Arthus was a doink (though his character arc has grown on me, while Thrall's... hasn't). The video ending for the human campaign is still my baseline for greatest cinematic ever. And I loved playing through the Undead campaign (even though the invasion of the Elvish lands always bogs down the playthrough, and has killed two LPs so far). I think what I liked about Warcraft 3 was the story in the manual, which explains the backstory (at least, the backstory up to that iteration) and explains what's been going on behind the scenes. I didn't care for WoW, because I don't do multiplayer. I did try to set up a private server so that I could play through the campaign, see where the story goes, but it never really seemed to work. Then I tried out one of those free servers (Russian or something) just to see what the game was like, and I didn't like it. So I ignored it, and marvelled at how much time and money people seemed to spend on it, and on news articles declaring that it was the end of civilization as we know it (must've been a Tuesday, I think).
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Apr 22, 2018 16:09
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Azzur posted:I did this awhile back, but I'm curious since we have a lot of newer readers or people who couldn't participate the first time around, so here's a little informal question: The original Warcraft game was probably the first RTS I ever played, back when I was young enough that my dad had to play most of the hard levels for me. It was a cool game, even if it was kind of broken by just bringing archers/spearmen to curbstomp most things, and everything else could be worn down by wizard/warlock summons over time. It was also cool that it had its "adventure" stages, and its kind of odd that it had "neutral" creatures and "adventure" levels which then more-or-less disappeared by WC2(well not completely, but they felt a bit more jury-rigged) and then it was like Warcraft 3 realized they were a good part of telling a story, because not every part of the story could be rigged to involve base-building. And of course, the original Warcraft game had a loving AWESOME manual. It was one of the real classics, with tons of flavour text and stories to really get you hooked. The sort of thing you read on the way home from the store, or while the game was installing, and which just really conjured the game so clearly in your mind. And even if the actual game failed to live up to it, the manual managed to make it a magical experience anyway. Strangely enough I have less clear memories of WC2. Which, again, feels like the odd one out, due to also, for instance, having naval aspects which disappeared again for WC3, lacking the occasional "adventure" focus of WC1, and also having a much more technical and less story-focused manual than WC1. It also felt like it had a less important place in the story, aside from introducing us to the fact that elves and trolls exist in the Warcraft world. Warcraft 3 I remember clearly, mostly for how hyped I was for years when they were reporting on the game, and how, at first, it sounded far more hero-focused and less-base focused, more like an RPG where you had a home base you returned to on occasion, with like, a persistent world/campaign rather than discrete levels in the same way as what we were used to... and how disappointed I was by the fact that it was a lot more generic when it launched. In general I was pretty disappointed by the main WC3 campaign, in part because every campaign feels more like a tutorial, where each level exists more or less just to introduce a new unit/concept/structure and then at the very end of each campaign, you get a "real" mission where all the pieces are actually in play. WC3 was also where they really, really cranked up the cartoony art style. WC1 and 2 were to some degree stylized so you could actually recognize your units even at a low resolution, when they didn't take up a lot of screen real estate each. But compared to Warcraft 3, 1 and 2 were practically hyper-realistic. It focused on orcs, humans and ten flavours of elf, while teasing a more interesting and less generic world you didn't get to interact with(especially in the expansion) in the form of the Nerubians, Nagas, etc. Not to mention that I was just plain disappointed by the story(some of the beats, especially in the expansion, were alright, mind you, but overall): Orcs couldn't just get to be a few shades of black, they had to be NOBLE SAVAGES. We got more goddamn elves when we didn't need them. Medivh was suddenly a good guy all along???? So many lovely, lovely retcons, it felt like. But what kept me coming back to Warcraft 3, even long after I had more or less forgotten WC1 and WC2, was the same thing that kept me coming back to Battle.Net for years in the Starcraft days: Custom mapping. I don't think I ever played a single normal-rules Warcraft 3 map on Battle.Net, because I had no real fondness for the basic mechanics, but people did a lot of cool poo poo with Warcraft 3 maps and scripting. I genuinely regret that I no longer have the huge collection of Warcraft 3 maps I once had, because man, some of them deserve to be digitally immortalized. For several years, it was basically THE game to me. An entire summer just spent hunkered down with pizza and Warcraft 3 custom maps... it's one of the few times I'm genuinely nostalgic for, because it was just such pure fun. Thankfully it was during a high school year which I was breezing through without any effort, so while it could've tanked me something serious, it never quite did. At some point I took a break, returned and... it just didn't catch me again. It felt like the entire creative part of the playerbase had vanished, and all that remained was porn maps, DOTA(and not even any of the GOOD DOTA maps that employed really creative scripting. I think it was EOTA or EOTE that really amazed me even though I only saw people playing it once... and possibly for good reason, because I seem to remember that some of the hero skill tooltips involved quadratic equations. Generally I was really into the DOTA variants that involved some degree of unit/base management as well, retaining the independent bases, but allowing players to expand and upgrade them, because proper siege power required siege unit backup, heroes themselves were largely garbage for hurting buildings even if they could mince units like no one's business and I'll shut up now because that entire genre of map was probably only that fascinating to me alone.) and tower defense maps(okay, some of those were actually pretty fun). I never played World of Warcraft, but just hearing about it was equal to the whole hype-and-disappointment cycle of Warcraft 3 compressed into a single day. My dad asking me if I'd heard there was a new Warcraft game coming out, both of us checking up on it... and realizing it was a subscription MMO, at which point the series was more or less dead to us. And I'd be surprised if it's ever going to be restored as a strategy series, either turn-based or RTS, because Jesus, how do you even catch anyone up on the compacted and composted layers of lore and memes, corruptions and time travel and other bullshit that WoW has built up? You'd more or less need to declare WoW non-canon and continue on with a separate story branch. Then again, maybe that's for the best. After all, we all prayed for a Starcraft 2, and that turned out to be some hosed up Monkey's Paw style wish fulfillment, didn't it?
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Apr 22, 2018 16:14
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My family during the days of DOS usually played Warlords, Master of Magic and Master of Orion, so it wasn't until Warcraft II came out that we actually started playing it. I was somewhere around 6-8 years old at the time, and if I hadn't watched my father play Wolfenstein when I was 5, I probably wouldn't even realize that the red stuff was blood (gasp!) I clearly remember being really proud of realizing what the gore meant and how cool and mature I was for not being scared of it. Naturally I couldn't play it because I was a child and RTSes were never my forte, but I loved the lore and the art as well, and would spend hours pouring over everything with as much enthusiasm as I did the family's D&D Monster Manual. I also remember walking around quoting the joke lines at school, thinking I was the coolest person ever for knowing them. Unfortunately, being a girl, none of my other friends got into games, especially ones with blood and war, so I was left pretending I liked My Little Pony and Polly Pocket more than Warcraft when I was with my friends, but by the time Warcraft III came out, the internet was a thing and I had procured some online friends with whom I could sperg with. I never ended up beating either WC2 or 3, but I still have fond memories of reading off strategies in our strategy guide for my brother, or watching the minimap for enemies while he focused on base building. I claim it was a team effort, even though I never actually beat it myself. Of course, that also meant I ended up playing World of Warcraft. The entire family migrated to it from Everquest the moment it was released (There were *Instanced Dungeons*! Truly this was the game of the future!!) And I remember that one of my online friends said that if I played filthy lovely Alliance, especially a Gnome or a Rogue one, that they would personally hunt me down and grief me for the rest of my life. So my first character was a Gnome Rogue named "Annoyance". Like you do. Eventually though I settled into my two "main" characters, Calosa the Night Elf Druid and Jadilan the Undead Priest, which showed just how many fucks I actually gave about this "Alliance vs Horde" bullshit the game and players kept trying to push on us. I RPed a lot with lots of my friends, and some of them joined me and we all hung out together, playing the game and having fun, (We once had a three man guild that my sister, a friend, and I would play with, and we'd run dungeons together with just the three of us to prove we could). I ended up in univeristy and everyone laughed at me because I was "the WoW player that books say to avoid because you're going to fail your classes", but jokes on them I never failed any classes and graduated with a 3.0 GPA and flipped everyone off out the doors. Eventually, with me moving to another country and a lot of my friends moving on from WoW, and with the constant push to have these two factions kill each other despite the other half of the story clearly stating that everyone is an idiot for doing so, I eventually got bored, decided that Calosa joined the Cenarian faction while Jadilan stayed behind to fight the evil undead, and I dropped the game with only a slightly heavy heart. When I go home to visit my parents however, my dad (who still plays regularly) still has his discipline priest, which he has given to me to play because Disc Priest is the only thing in WoW that isn't really in any other game and is super cool and I still kinda miss. Overall though I still watch people play Hearthstone, and when a new instance or expansion drops, I ask Dad what the story behind it is so I can keep up on the lore.
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Apr 22, 2018 17:59
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My first experience with anything Blizzard was going to a friend's house and being shown Starcraft, which was notable to me both because I thought the game looked really cool, but also because of the mindblowing revelation that you could play video games... on the computer. I spent a lot of time with that, but not because of the campaigns which i mostly cheated my way through, but because of the custom maps. I probably spent a couple hundred hours trying to beat the drat Racoon City game, which was probably actually impossible in retrospect. At some point, my family got a new computer, and that meant reinstalling Starcraft... except my brother had broken the Brood War disc for fun a few days before, that loving rear end in a top hat. Playing Starcraft without the expansion didn't feel right at that point, so I looked around and found out Blizzard made another game called Warcraft 3, and wow these hero units look cool, and it's in 3D holy moly. I was hooked immediately, pushing through each of the campaigns without cheating (mostly, the finales of campaigns 2 and 4 were really hard ok?). After that I jumped online and proceeded to lose years of my life to Run Kitty Run, Dragonball Z Tribute, Civilization Wars, various anime DotA clones, Vampirism, Tech Wars, LOTR, dozens of TD maps etc etc. I was addicted to WC3's custom games like most people got hooked onto WoW. Every second I wasn't in school I was on the computer, meant for the entire family mind you, playing some stupid bullshit on Warcraft 3. I had originally gotten Warcraft 3 somewhere in 2003, and there wasn't a day that went by that I didn't pour at least 4 hours into it until about 2009. I've tried WoW a few times. I didn't enjoy vanilla WoW, only making it to level 21 before quitting the game because I switched out my sword and shield for some lovely 2 hander that I thought was better cause it dealt more damage, but actually downgraded me enough that I could barely 1v1 mobs that were my own level. I came back for the Wrath of the Lich King because a friend of mine was playing, and I had some fun for a time, even if he did pull the classic "ill level with you to cap, ok?" *ditches you to play on main after like 3 levels*. I never got to see Icecrown but I figured it was probably because I had shown up so late to the expansion. With Cataclysm I planned to stick around from the very start and earn a raid spot immediately to make sure I couldn't get left behind. Then my friend's dad died, and he had to move in with his mother on the other side of the country. I thought I'd stick with it to keep in touch with him, but then he also died a few months later. After that, I didn't even want to think about the game. It had been his obsession, and I couldn't separate the feelings I had about his death from the game, so I severed myself from it completely. I'd never made any friends through it anyway, so it was easy to just uninstall, unsubscribe and forget about it. Since then I've only come back to Warcraft 3 and WoW on occasion, as a sort of tour of what they've become rather than a serious effort to get back in. I played Legion for a bit, jumped through a few private servers (including a Cata server; small mercy that I missed out on that expansion) and checked for any new customs in 3. I play a lot of Hearthstone now, and if I ever find a work ethic inside myself I'm going to make a game that uses it heavily as inspiration, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. sirtommygunn fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 17:59
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Azzur posted:I did this awhile back, but I'm curious since we have a lot of newer readers or people who couldn't participate the first time around, so here's a little informal question: The Warcraft 1 demo was the first RTS I ever played, but Starcraft ended up being the first full game I actually got; my first Warcraft game was Warcraft 3, and at some point I went and got the Warcraft 2 battle chest and played part of the way through the campaigns of both the original and Beyond The Dark Portal. I never got into WoW, partially because I was concerned it'd end up eating too much of my time in school and partially because the $15 monthly subscription felt pretty steep and I'd feel obligated to justify the expense by playing it every month when my natural inclination with video games is to play them in a concentrated burst for a while, then forget about them for a long time afterwards. I made a bit of a habit of following WoW lore via the wiki for a while, but when Mists Of Pandera was announced I pretty much gave up, because recycling an April Fool's joke as a major expansion felt like a pretty clear sign they'd run out of ideas.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:17
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My Blizzard experience goes through quite a couple of games. I know I've played Rock n Roll racing on a friends console way back then and I vague memories of playing Blackthorne as well. Over the years I've played Warcraft 2, Starcraft and Brood War (cleared the campaigns with the invul cheat code on as I recall  ), Diablo 1 and 2.Funny enough I think I either skipped Warcraft 3 and TFT or hovered over someones shoulder to see the campaigns but I never played it myself to any massive extent. What I do on the other hand remember is being at LAN parties and hearing constant asks about playing DOTA. Oh how time goes by. Now World of Warcraft was a whole other thing, played it as early as the European Beta and then I stuck through it, probably to the detriment of studies and such (big surprise there) until Cataclysm. By that point all my friends (some of them I had made through the game and some things surrounding it such as a webradio show) had stopped playing and I didn't want to chug on by myself. But I still look back fondly to that time because I greatly enjoyed exploring and a lot of the writing was nice not to mention the world design. Even managed to do some raiding during early to mid WOTLK. But I turned out to be really awful at in general so not something I miss doing or would want to do again. Played enough to see the rough my point in my eyes where the overall plot writing was very much beginning to crumble as well. I still keep track of the gam but by now I'm almost four expansions behind in terms of levels and content which means as much as I want to go back to playing I don't have the urge to do so. Also the fact I don't have any income helps a lot in making me not play it too. But in general I keep somewhat up to date with the lore and the setting and have thought about running a Warcraft RPG campaign but that has never gone beyond the very early stages because I don't know jack poo poo about preparing sessions and such.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:54
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When I was a kid, my dad had Warcraft 2. I remember seeing him try to play it a few times, but I honestly don't remember how much he actually played it. It was my first Blizzard game, and I got hooked, both on the game, and the stories in the manuals. I didn't read the backstory so much at the time, but I loved the unit descriptions and stuff. I got hooked on the lore, and eventually did read through the story. We eventually got a copy of the expansion, and Warcraft 1, though because I'd started with Warcraft 2, I didn't get nearly so good a grip of playing Warcraft 1. The limitations chafed after starting with the much more user-friendly Warcraft 2. Of course, being the huge Warcraft nerd that I am/was, I had to get the novels when they came out, and Warcraft 3... basically I've been a Warcraft addict ever since, and still play WoW to this day. I've taken occasional breaks, but I have no real plans to leave; many of my friends play the game, but many also don't, and it hasn't really hurt my social life outside the game. Even without WoW, my social life is primarily online, even with my IRL friends. But being as big into the lore as I am in WoW, and the way my decently creative brain works, and me playing on a roleplaying server... well, let's just say I think I was destined to have an enormous cast of characters floating around my brain. I remain quite happily addicted to WoW, and I eagerly await the release of Battle for Azeroth. Many people talk about how much they hate certain aspects of gameplay, or how much they hate how the story is written... and I can honestly say that I don't always see it. My mind tends to overlook or ignore the negative aspects of the media I'm enjoying. I focus on what I liked about it. I rationalize what's happening. My brain doesn't ask "why did they write that character that way". My brain looks at it as "Why did that character behave that way?" It honestly makes it a lot easier for me to enjoy what I enjoy, simply because I'm not always picking it apart to find what I don't like about it. Even when I attempt to, I actively find it difficult to do. I enjoy it, why can't I just leave it at that?
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Apr 22, 2018 21:10
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My Warcraft experiences- One summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, July 1995, I spent some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, staying at the home of an old childhood friend. This was when I'd been living out of the country for a number of years. He had two games that I played to excess- Final Fantasy VI and Warcraft 2. I didn't have the time to finish either while I was in Santa Fe, but I played enough to know they were great games. That fall I bought them as soon as I could and played them till I had finished both. First Warcraft 2 achievement- finished Orc Campaign at Demigod Rating, a feat I haven't accomplished since.  After that, I played the Human Campaign, then got Warcraft 1 and played that along with BtDP and WC3 when they came out. I had varied experiences with the games and their stories- the games were fun mostly, but I hated having to play as Arthas in WC3 and watch his fall from grace, but enjoyed the Undead Campaign and what came after. I enjoyed the Summoned Creatures in WC1 but missed my Naval Units. I still missed them in WC3. Never played WoW, I'm not into the constant monthly fees mostly. I also dislike how convoluted and crazy the WoW Lore has become for all kinds of reasons I won't get into. This LP- I like it because it's well-written, simple premise, lots of comedy and interesting characters that make an old favorite game even greater. Keep up the good work, Azzur, and I hope to see more updates or Lore soon. Always fun to relive good memories. 
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Apr 22, 2018 22:24
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My first was the warcraft 2 demo. I tried it at my grandfathers(God knows how he got that), and brought a burnt cd of it home. Eventually I had the full original campaign, but to this day I never played the expansion. The wc2 disk has been lost for years. Warcraft 3 was the rest of my childhood. I played the campaign, but battlenet was so much better. Somehow I discovered the world editor and the custom maps scene, which got me involved with thehelper, wc3campaigns, and hive workshop(And its predecessor). The interest in mapping and scripting there got me interesting in programming, which lead me to going for a CS degree. I never thought about it until now, but warcraft has had an enormous impact on my life. Yet I never played WoW.
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Apr 23, 2018 00:18
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I'm really happy to see all of these responses. It's wonderful to see where some of these experiences overlap and where they diverge. It sort of it's own little walk down memory lane. And if people are just browsing the thread and have no experience with Warcraft, that's okay, too! I think it'd be interesting to get the perspective of someone who has never played these games (though, at this point, I think most everyone is at least tangentially aware of Warcraft in some sense). And stay tuned to the thread, I still like to do contests and stuff. Audience participation is always fun with these sorts of projects!
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Apr 23, 2018 01:00
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Come to think of it, when this LP was last going on and I was doing those in-character news reports on WoW stuff showing things from earlier games, I was still a Horde main. Four or five expansions later have seen me an Alliance main for a long time. Funny to think that in WoW's forthcoming expansion it's going to be the Alliance that has six of its eleven races as displaced refugees trying to find a new home or retake their old one from those who conquered it and it will be the Horde that's mostly established, settled races and empires.
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Apr 23, 2018 01:17
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Cythereal posted:Come to think of it, when this LP was last going on and I was doing those in-character news reports on WoW stuff showing things from earlier games, I was still a Horde main. Four or five expansions later have seen me an Alliance main for a long time. I don't think I ever talked about it, but when I started playing my main was a human Holy Paladin (I leveled Holy and everything back in the days before Holy Shock). Then Burning Crusade came out and I leveled a... Blood Elf Holy Paladin. Also all of my alts were Holy Pallies. I think I had a serious problem. But it helped when it came to raiding!
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Apr 23, 2018 01:48
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Azzur posted:I don't think I ever talked about it, but when I started playing my main was a human Holy Paladin (I leveled Holy and everything back in the days before Holy Shock). Then Burning Crusade came out and I leveled a... Blood Elf Holy Paladin. Also all of my alts were Holy Pallies. I think I had a serious problem. But it helped when it came to raiding! Can you now shoot lasers from your eyes? Thats why paladin eyes glow, right? Lasers?
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Apr 23, 2018 01:59
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Azzur posted:I don't think I ever talked about it, but when I started playing my main was a human Holy Paladin (I leveled Holy and everything back in the days before Holy Shock). Then Burning Crusade came out and I leveled a... Blood Elf Holy Paladin. Also all of my alts were Holy Pallies. I think I had a serious problem. But it helped when it came to raiding! I started as a resto druid (tauren because that was the only option for the Horde for a long time), briefly went blood elf holy paladin in Wrath and Cataclysm, and then settled on pandaren restoration shaman which has been my main ever since. I also mained a medicine operative in TOR and an astrologian in FF14 (conjurer/white mage pre-Heavensward). I have a problem.
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Apr 23, 2018 02:03
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Cythereal posted:I started as a resto druid (tauren because that was the only option for the Horde for a long time), briefly went blood elf holy paladin in Wrath and Cataclysm, and then settled on pandaren restoration shaman which has been my main ever since. Healing buddy! All masochists who stare at fluctuating green bars check in here. (Or in FF14's case, little pink bars)
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Apr 23, 2018 02:07
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lobster22221 posted:Can you now shoot lasers from your eyes? Thats why paladin eyes glow, right? Lasers? That's where Holy Shock comes from, obviously.
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Apr 23, 2018 02:09
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Azzur posted:That's where Holy Shock comes from, obviously. You will no doubt be pleased to know that in the new WoW expansion blood elves are getting a cosmetic option to finally lose their glowing green eyes and get glowing golden eyes instead. Legion also added super draenei with glowing gold eyes instead of the normal draenei's blue glow.
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Apr 23, 2018 02:18
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This is gonna be a long one. My history with Warcraft basically doubles as my history with Blizzard. I played both Lost Vikings and Justice League Taskforce (of all things) before ever getting my first ever taste of Warcraft. I don't remember how old I was, over at my uncle's house, watching him play Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness for the first time. I remember the room, the corner the computer sat, even the month (October). It was Human Mission 5, Tol Barad, where you save the Stromgarde base from the Black Tooth Grin clan and fight back. I was enamored. Imagine playing the game myself whenever I wasn't watching my uncle or was back at my house. I remember him during the Grim Batol mission using the catapault's attack ground feature to try and siege the canon towers and losing them since attack ground had shorter range than the usual attack. Over the months he completed it and I was constantly picking up his save games and trying my hand at them. One of the more hilarious times was during a big family get-together. Human Mission 11, taking on Alterac. A bunch of us tried our hand at the mission, failing to break through the Alterac defenses guarding the peaseants. Eventually on my turn I went exploring and found the main Alterac base and started destroying that instead without a single clue I was doing the mission wrong. Another time I actually loaded up my uncle's Orc Final Mission and beat it. At Christmas Eve, sitting on my uncle's couch, I opened my present and got Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. I raised it above my head and cheered. Or so I was told, I was half-asleep and all sick at the time. I installed it on my computer and got completely stonewalled on the cave mission for humans, and on the orc mission after that. Tried off and on over years, royally pissed off my mom by deleting her saved game at one point. Eventually, I got a copy of Tides of Darkness for myself and played through it. Beyond the Dark Portal was also out, and my uncle had it, and I played it there but my performance was even worse. I couldn't complete Orc 1, and while I could do Human 1, Human 2 was well beyond me. Then, during a visit to a doctor, I was playing around with a bunch of other kids and let slip about Warcraft and BAM. Cheats were now in my hand! I completed Tides soon after, then BtDP when I could. At that point my uncle had moved on to Diablo, and after that was StarCraft. I actually bought the strategy guide for StarCraft despite not actually owning it. Cheated my way through both it and Brood War. My uncle eventually burned BtDP and the StarCrafts for me. Along the way I did beat Tides legit though. Even had Dark Saga, the PS1 version with awful load times but the BtDP act ending cutscenes that weren't in the PC version. Diablo 2 also came out, and while I enjoyed my necromancer time I was just never big into Diablo. Then came 2002, I got the internet and Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos was finally coming out and... I didn't get it. Instead going halfsies on buying a completely different RTS that ended up being a solid purchase anyway. Hell, I think I ended up playing that more recently than War3. My uncle got it ahead of me and when I talked to him about it to compare our purchases it was almost funny how different the two games were. Of course, I eventually did get it. Still ended up cheating my way through despite being almost competent at games at this time. Honestly more for the story than anything... Along the way I bailed a complete disaster of a situation too, heh. At the time though, I only had internet access on the weekends, so, only could get on b.net a little and was constantly fighting for time. So much fighting. But eventually made some good buds who introduced my to the glory of custom games. We made a pre-clans clan by changing our handles to something similar. Dealt with the communities, made a lot of memories. The Frozen Throne came, and clans officially came together. Though things eventually fell apart just due to drift but I still kept my clan name moniker for my War3 handle, even coming back years after to completely empty friends' list. And then came World of Warcraft. It's almost weird to think of a world without WoW now, it's nearly as old as I was at its release. I tried a variety of heroes. Gnome warrior was my first, made it to 10 before switching. Tried cooperating with community friends and such but never got far there either. Tried leveling a character together with my brother but we always split. Had a couple of the famous Tarren Mill vs Southshore fights though. After eventually abandoning a level 39 Warlock in Desolace I just went and made a paladin. My brother joined on to help level him but eventually drifted off like always and eventually after longer than eternity my paladin was my first level 60. What a terrible mistake that was. I could spend hours talking about what a wretched class the vanilla paladin was and even worse was my brother on his 60 warrior doing poo poo that would make anyone envious. This was still back when leveling was an enormous chore, and between limited time due to school and having to share the computer and paladins having the DPS output of a healer meant it could take days to level even once. So, sunk cost fallacy had sunk in and any attempt to get another class up just met in failure somewhere in the teens. I never had any success with my paladin. Working three times as hard to be as quarterly effective as any other class. I did at least manage to scrap together enough to get his special paladin mount though. Meanwhile my brother was on a top-end raiding guild. He got both Ashkandi and Sulfuras! I was struggling to get dungeon invites. The only guild I ever joined that wasn't wretched was because it had exploded due to drama and the one officer who'd stuck around was a drat good person. Helped get me into raids where I never got anything but he was just a swell guy. Despite vanilla being vanilla it managed to hold enough my interest enough for The Burning Crusade to drop. And in that brief magical pre-patch moment paladins were suddenly a playable class. The addition of an actual offensive ability was a goddamn wonder and I grinded my rear end to a Grand Marshal's Claymore in actual fun hours. The rest of TBC ended up being irrelevant. The actual attack ability got a health nerf bat, TBC dungeons were ugly, terrible affairs and I just sort of petered out. I was first in my guild to 70 then quit not long after. Came back after a time, had a funny story of getting my Netherwing mount solely because of a lucky egg spawn and riding that sweet dragon for five seconds before my time ran out. Threw a guildie a lot of gold to get flying for himself then quit again. My brother had also abandoned his warrior for whatever reason. To this day, that warrior has the second-most /played time of any character on the account and almost solely in vanilla. Wrath of the Lich King arrived in all its glory. Started a death knight in all its absolutely insane brokenness. Had a ton of fun with the mini raids as 40+ level 55 DKs fought off a dozen level 70s loving with Outland leveling. Had some minor success in guild, but died off. Came back, came back very successfully this time. Set my sights on what I wanted to do and did it. I became top DPS in my newest guild, consistently got my dailies done. Grinded out the money to buy the best pre-raid sword, got the incredibly expensive at the time Traveller's Tundra Mammoth and after literally months of farming and taking up tanking getting myself a near full set of pre-raid best in slot gear... quit. Quit right as my guild was making attempts at ICC and I was one of the only DPS hitting the minimum checks. My interest was just waning and the agonizing grind to get a certain necklace had exhausted me. On top of that my computer was just feeling its age. I could barely load Dalaran by that point. While I kept a eye at Cataclysm pre-release I eventually stopped caring. And partly because of Azzur's threads. I've preferred the Alliance. And back in 2010 I was starting to get real defensive and lovely about it too. I threadshit a lot in the previous thread and I'm not proud of it. But, eventually I even did release that. I had a huge spergy post written up in response to the usual bickering and I took a step back, released it was just a game and I shouldn't get this worked up about it and went and did something fun isntead. And that something fun won me archives access--thanks again, Azzur!. I've definitly put that to use over the past 8 years. I was even rereading the WarCraft 2 threads in archives due to the War3 LP going on that almost heralded his return. Funny coincidence there. But back in 2010, StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty was coming out and... well, my computer that couldn't handle Dalaran didn't handle SC2. Like, I had loading screens longer than the missions. I eventually got a new computer because of that. I sort of half-assedly kept abreast of Blizzard game's during this time but felt no need to play them. But my SC2 interest led me to streaming, and streaming led to pro-play and pro-play led to HuskyStarcraft which led to Heroes of the Storm. I grew sort of ridiculously enarmoured with a Alpha-phase game and started watching the few handfuls of streams going on. Eventually bought my way into the beta and whatnot. Since I was so hype on it, I watched Blizzcon and stuff, learned of Warlords of Draenor and sort of shook my head at it (after all the gods and poo poo the next boss is just some guy!?) but didn't care. Legion, changed that. Almost entirely as Blizzard baited. ASHBRINGER and its thousand memes. I kept half-checked in at this point, the Burning Legion being my second favorite faction and whatnot. Eventually my brother convinces me to give demon hunters a shot and well, here I am a year and a half later and still playing every day so something's gone right! I even leveled an alt! In a modestly successful guild as top DPS again. Got a couple of impressive achievements under my belt. I've kept a healthy distance from faction debate this time around. Still pro-Alliance, but it's not worth the trouble to get so heated about it, y'know? And honestly, I have dealt with far, far worse loving plots than WoW could ever sink into so I just sort of go along with the flow now. I'm actually like the one person I know hyped for Battle for Azeroth. Because, like up above, my first experience with Warcraft ever was Human Mission 5. And well, in BfA, we're finally taking Stromgarde back. For the Alliance! But yeah, super-glad to have you back Azzur, and good to see everyone's history with this franchise. For all its warts, it's right up there with Halo and Suikoden for game franchises that have affected my life. I think I've grow a bit wiser because of it, and because of your threads. So thank you. McTimmy fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 02:52
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This is my new favorite page of the thread.
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Apr 23, 2018 03:13
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I think I started playing Starcraft using a friend's discs in the first year of middle school, after learning some RTS a couple years earlier through Command and Conquer when I stayed at my cousin's house in upstate New York (ok, Hudson Valley, but to an NYC kid, anything north of the Bronx was upstate to me) one summer. I tended to be terrible at it, mostly cheating my way to victory to get the storyline. That same friend lent me his WC2 discs after I finished vanilla SC, and I played some of it. Again, cheated my way to victory most of the time. Some of my cousins also played the game or had the Orcs and Humans demo, so I discussed the game with them when we had family dinners and all that. I remember pouring over the manual and somehow retaining a lot of the info that was in the thing, since I knew Blizzard manuals tended to be thick and full of info even back then when substantial manuals were still a thing. I remember coming across an O&H box with the game in a bargain section of like an EB Games maybe once a couple years later when those stores still existed. My mom (or aunt, I forget which) refused to buy it for me because it didn't look appropriate to her. I played a lot of D2 in Internet cafes with kids I knew from summer Chinese SAT prep schools classes in Flushing during the latter years of middle school and the beginning of high school after those prep schools let out. It was there I learned about WC3. I remember buying it with money I made proctoring tests at that summer prep school like right before sophomore year in HS, and reading the manual during Chemistry class or something like that. Again, I was rear end at the game, and my brother has always been a better RTS player than me, I think it was him who eventually bought Frozen Throne when it came out. When I did play, I mostly cheated it to get through the story, a lot of which I retained knowledge of. I also played a lot of Custom games, which could be a lot of fun. WoW was a thing that was on my mind in the latter years of high school, and one of the first things I did when I got to college was go to the local Best Buy and get it and some game cards. I made the one character I played for a number of years, a Dwarf Arms Warrior, and got down to it. My academics suffered because of it, and I never did find a good enough guild to raid much. My RA did a lot of raiding on the Horde side on a different server, watched him run through Molten Core and Onyxia a couple times, and the leadership of one of the higher end Alliancd guilds on my server happened to be in the same dorm as I was, and I got to know them through getting enchants through them and then hanging in their room while they did AQ and stuff like that. I think a guy on my floor also ran with an Alliance raiding guild just beginning to break into MC, on the same server as the original guild that did the Leeroy Jenkins video (I think he told me he once ran into Leeroy himself in game). I was always super interested about lore and stuff, so I learned all I could while playing WoW. The wikis at that point were more rudimentary, but I read the tie in novels and all that because I was a voracious devourer of trivial knowledge. My cousin also got into WoW earlier than I did, playing a Tauren Shaman and doing better than I was when he was still in high school, with a dedicated TeamSpeak channel and friends he raided with. Moved to a different college closer to home, and fell in with a group there who were Horde raiders. By that time, Burning Crusade had been out for a couple months. Hung out with them, and they kept me interested in the game. Another guy who hung out with them hooked up his laptop to a internet port in our preferred hangout spot and raided from time to time as an Alliance character while I watched and kept me informed about the higher level stuff in Outland. My interest had began to wane as I stopped played before BC was out, but some of my cousins and friends continued to play. I think I kept up with news up until like Cataclysm and Mists, which is also when my cousin stopped playing as well. I continued to have a ton of knowledge about the lore of the game though wikis and stuff like that, but as Mists rolled into Warlords, I just couldn't keep up with it all and stopped. By the time I graduated, I had met more friends who were playing the game but without the same fervor as before. I could talk some Warcraft stuff with them lore wise, but they were never as into it as me, as I could vomit out lore as only an obsessive could. My cousin who stayed the longest in WoW never really cared for the lore beyond the broad strokes of "what do I need to do to complete this quest or open up this next raid", so talking lore with him was pretty much pointless. GhostStalker fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 03:54
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Thinking back I had a long term relationship with Warcraft and Blizzard when I was younger. A neighbor several houses down had the original Warcraft when I was in middle school and I watched their dad play, and as one does I... somehow... acquired a copy which I never finished. Eventually I got a copy of Warcraft II which I was able to complete, and my memories fade a bit at that point. I came back to Starcraft and had a blast with that, and I'd still love to do an LP if I could work out getting the game to work on a Mac along with recording. It was enough that I felt the need to pick up Warcraft III when it came out. At one point a woman I knew got me into World of Warcraft and I played that pretty much the entire time I was in the military, eventually topping out with a level 70 rogue back when that was about as high as you could go. I never much cared for the raids and the grinding of the end game, so when I got out and went to college I retired my account and never looked back. I've still wanted to get back into Starcraft II, but a lack of time and compatibility issues have kept me out so far. Maybe someday.
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Apr 23, 2018 04:35
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I've only played Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne. So I'm not all that invested in the lore. I wasn't that big with the multiplayer. I think I played a little with all the races, although my favorite "strategy" was Steam Tank rushing, which tended to fail if my opponent scouted at all. Which they usually did. Obviously, I wasn't very good. I did play Starcraft 1 and 2, although once again I pretty much ignored multiplayer. I bought SC 2: HotS very late on. Still haven't bought Legacy of the Void, but I keep thinking about getting around to that. The only RTS I've played since then was Larian's Divinity: Dragon Commander. At one point I was even thinking of doing a semi-narrative LP of it, but after Larian murdered it (their own words), and I moved on to other things, I lost interest. Stabbey_the_Clown fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 05:11
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Charlett posted:My family during the days of DOS usually played Warlords Yo what up fellow Warlords player  My first experience with Warcraft was through the shareware disk that I recall being part of the package my family got when we got an Acer desktop with Windows 98. Don't know why we got a shareware disk for a game that by then was a couple years old but then we also had shareware for Quake, Heretic, and a whole slew of other games that were already "old" by the time we got that computer. Regardless, that was my first experience with Warcraft and Blizzard, and while we never did get a retail copy of Warcraft II (probably because no one in the family could beat the last missions for either factions) we did end up buying Diablo not too long after that and that game will always hold a special place in my heart because I was the first to beat that game in my family. 7 years old and I beat my 14 year old brother to it, it's the little things  . We also had a very old PowerMac computer (think we purchased it in 1990 and that thing was a loving tank too, it died in 2012) that we didn't really buy new games for because this was the 90s and lol who plays games on a Mac? Well Blizzard seemed to be the only company that had Mac support but there was no way we were gonna be able to get any of their newer games on that thing but we did buy Orcs and Humans for the Mac. Even that was too much for the PowerMac, we had to upgrade the RAM in order for the game to run but in the mean time, as others have mentioned, Orcs and Humans had a loving awesome manual to read through, I think the game is long gone now but I kept that manual. I have kept a lot of manuals for all my games from my childhood because those things were a blast!So in terms of ownership Orcs and Humans was the first Warcraft game that we owned that I could play through the entire thing, although I never did finish it before the game disk went *poof* one day and vanished out of existence. I got to...the 4th or 5th level for the Orcs and the 9th level for the Humans before getting stumped, maybe not the 9th level but it was the one where you had to kill Medivh. But by this point I was also playing other Blizzard games on a more regular basis, my cousins owned both Tides of Darkness AND Beyond the Dark Portal so I played both of those fairly frequently when I would visit, but I never got very far because as a kid you aren't exactly going to be beating a lot of those missions in under an hour, especially not anything from Beyond the Dark Portal. These same cousins also introduced us to StarCraft and I actually ended up playing StarCraft a whoooooooole lot more than any of the Warcraft games. Now I mentioned Diablo before, right? So one day my parents take me to a neighbour's for a party and one of the renters there tells me about this Blizzard game I would probably love, Diablo 2. Yeah I didn't really play any Warcraft or even StarCraft on a regular basis for the next 3 years because Diablo 2 and Lord of Destruction was what I played most of the time, same with my dad, and my siblings. But, we did still have those games kicking around and every so often I would try to play them legit, to this day I still struggle to not just turn on god mode when playing because I just do not have the patience to play correctly. Diablo 2 was just so much more fun to play, it was easy to make up a character and it was a challenge at the later difficulty levels so it kept me coming back. That and by this time I had long been introduced to Command and Conquer so I was going through every single one of those games since they were easier to play (while Warlords 2 was my first strategy game Dune 2 was my first RTS) and Heroes of Might and Magic. When I think back on it most of the games that had staying power in my house were ones that were multiplayer, and I was the only one who really liked C&C. Anyway, in 2002 I was visiting my cousins one day and they were playing an RTS I hadn't seen before and it had purple Elves in it. Two of them were playing each other in a LAN match of Warcraft 3. I had no idea this game existed! The last Warcraft game I was looking forward to was Lord of the Clans and I never knew (until a year or two later when I decided to look it up online) there was another game after that. Now I didn't ask to borrow this game because it was 2002 and it was the heyday of Napster and filesharing, so I went home that day and found a gamerip through...whatever the filesharing service we were using at the time was called (another fun story, my brother and I didn't really care too much about malware or other fun things people might send you with your music or games so during the year we were doing all this downloading stuff we had to get that old Acer detoxed 2 or 3 times!). I loved playing Reign of Chaos and I found it a lot easier than the previous entries, but I was still a bit of a cheater. Despite the fact that I was getting up at 6:30am every day so I could play Warcraft 3 for at least 1 hour before school every day I still just played through every mission with god mode on (if it was a base building mission, I could always handle the dungeon crawls just fine). I still loved playing the game and really loved the story but drat if I could every buckle down and play legit, I think I only started doing that when I was an adult and decided to actually LEARN how to properly play an RTS. I didn't find out about Frozen Throne until 2006 when a different cousin gave me an unexpected gift one day. He gave me all of his Blizzard games because he was now too busy being an adult to lose time sinking into those games, so I got a Windows version of Orcs and Humans (never actually touched it), Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal, StarCraft and Brood War, and Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne. I never got around to beating Frozen Throne until this year because...I don't know, none of my friends at the time were really into Blizzard games and if they were it was Brood War or Lord of Destruction so it just sat in my collection except one New Years Eve when my friends saw I had it and we decided to play a bit. As for WoW, I was never really interested in it just because I didn't feel the concept fit with the setting they had made, I did not think it would do the story well (I was basing this off of the story they managed with Warcraft 3 and what we got with StarCraft) and the idea of paying a monthly subscription to play a game I was not about that, not at all. I maintained this opinion even up to when I was a 19 year old and started playing it because a girl I knew played it and told me to try it. I'm also a bit of a hermit so let's just say that the reason I play games didn't really mesh with what WoW was pushing, to this day when people I know tell me about their experiences with WoW I always think to myself "you did what? how did you bring yourself to do that?". I think what turned me away from WoW for good after only about 6 months of playing was that a) I had gone through vanilla, BC, WotLK, and was anticipating Cataclysm with my Dwarf Hunter but had never joined a clan or actually try to meet people because b) I was never sold on what seem to be the main draws for MMOs: daily quests, instances and raids. I am going to be honest, one of the reasons I never tried hard to learn how to beat those games as a kid was because that wasn't the reason I played video games, I played video games for a brief challenge that would be a distraction from growing up in a lovely neighbourhood. No I didn't grow up in a bad part of town or anything but for whatever reason for grades 1 through 6 I was always bullied and never seemed to make real friends with anyone because one day they would be nice and then a day later I would be getting ganged up on by the same kids from the day before that were being nice. I didn't understand, I didn't know how to express what was going on to anyone, authority figures were non-existent at the school or were unable to really do anything because of how many kids were responsible. Well because of stuff like that I looked at video games as something that I could always play by myself and get better and no one had to know if I needed to cheat to win. There was that, there was also the fact that I could continue playing Diablo 2 online FOR FREE, and during this time Wings of Liberty came out and within a week of playing and beating that game I felt I had wasted $70 and decided to just purge Blizzard from my system for a little while. From the beginning of 2011 to about 2013 I stopped playing Blizzard games entirely, even Diablo 2, who would have thought that StarCraft 2 would have that kind of effect on someone who grew up loving the company. However thanks to many an LP of various Blizzard games since then I have come around to remembering that I liked these games once and I shouldn't let newer, lovely ones ruin that 
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Apr 23, 2018 05:53
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Aces High posted:Well because of stuff like that I looked at video games as something that I could always play by myself and get better and no one had to know if I needed to cheat to win. There was that, there was also the fact that I could continue playing Diablo 2 online FOR FREE, and during this time Wings of Liberty came out and within a week of playing and beating that game I felt I had wasted $70 and decided to just purge Blizzard from my system for a little while. From the beginning of 2011 to about 2013 I stopped playing Blizzard games entirely, even Diablo 2, who would have thought that StarCraft 2 would have that kind of effect on someone who grew up loving the company. However thanks to many an LP of various Blizzard games since then I have come around to remembering that I liked these games once and I shouldn't let newer, lovely ones ruin that Y'know, Starcraft 2 is now free. And if you own the first campaign, you'll get the second one for free (or something like that). I picked it up because, well, it's free, and I'd liked that one aborted LP that the guy was running on Hard mode.
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Apr 23, 2018 06:34
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It's interesting that no one has really talked about Diablo 3 yet, given all the Blizzard games that we've woven through in our pasts. I had a roommate at one point that lived for that game. I remember watching his desk slowly pile up with cigarette ash as he played through the week. He would excitedly tell me how he paid for his half of the rent with items sold through the game.
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Apr 23, 2018 06:49
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I played Diablo 3. It was fun for a while. Got a female Wizard I was able to make into a facsimile of Evil-Lyn from Masters of the Universe, a female Crusader, a male Witch Doctor, and a male Demon Hunter through the game, shaking my head at some of the plot developments I hated all the while. Eventually the game’s repetition got to me and I traded it in. Never got into the auction part of the game. Never played Diablo 1 or 2 either. I prefer Warcraft as a game, and I’ve had more fun as Horde than Alliance. But to each their own taste.
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Apr 23, 2018 07:04
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Azzur posted:It's interesting that no one has really talked about Diablo 3 yet, given all the Blizzard games that we've woven through in our pasts. I had a roommate at one point that lived for that game. I remember watching his desk slowly pile up with cigarette ash as he played through the week. He would excitedly tell me how he paid for his half of the rent with items sold through the game. If we're adding Diablo into the mix, then my history with Blizzard would actually make for a halfway decent story. Diablo 1 was one of the first games I remember playing, mainly because my father had it installed on his computer and my parents didn't seem to notice whenever I would start carving my way through skeletons and demons. Anyway. I don't think I got very far in it for whatever reason, but after that I also remember playing Tides of Darkness! ...Which I also didn't get too far into, because my young brain was not good at strategy games. Then Diablo 2 came out, and my dad was a really big fan of the game to the point where he still plays it on occasion today, and as such I leeched off of him picking it up like the little bastard I was. (Note: Young Me was not actually a bastard. Just much more emotionally fragile and with no sense of taste when it came to pop culture.) That game I actually did beat, same for its expansion. Though I didn't ever go into the higher difficulties. It wasn't until Reign of Chaos came out that I really got into Blizzard stuff - that I remember very fondly playing through its campaign, quickly followed by Frozen Throne when that came out too. I don't remember how exactly I got the game in the first place when it came out but drat if I didn't enjoy playing it afterwards. I think that was when I actually started paying attention to Blizzard as a Good Studio that produced Good Games. Never got into the mod scene, and in hindsight I really regret that given the crazy stuff that's out there. Anyway after that things get kind of dull - I dabbled in WoW for a bit at one point when a friend let me create an alt but after that and playing on my own for a brief (and free) period it just lost my interest - I never was really a fan of online games in general and at the time there were other RPGs I could play through that were much more my speed (namely Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 among others). Of course that was when the Great Blizzard Drought hit and the studio didn't really reenter my consciousness until Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 came out. I'm not going to lie - I like Starcraft 2. I had fun playing it's campaigns. There, I said it. Maybe I never really got a sense of taste, but screw you guys anyway I won't back down  (Also I kind of skipped 1 though I did read up on its plot and to be honest I saw the storyline for what it was: a ridiculously cheesy excuse to have mans fight aliens and aliens fighting aliens.) Also I had a ton of fun with Diablo 3 too, though I never got into the whole market thing, mainly because by that point I was much more cynical about that sort of thing. Had I realized that I could have made legit cash off of it from insane people I might have reconsidered that part but hey whatcha gonna do. Odds are it would have taken too much work anyway. and I played that game so I could fry people with the Wizard's laser beams. Above all else though, I will always remember this one truth I've learned over the years: that Blizzard plots are and will always be hammily-acted excuses for you to stab a bunch of demons, (Diablo) for orcs and humans skeletons and elves to stab each other (Warcraft) or for mans to shoot aliens and be stabbed by aliens in return (Starcraft). I think that's a pretty decent way to look at things. Dr. Snark fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 07:22
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...And here my experience with Blizzard started with me getting into WoW about a year after it released. I legitimately didn’t know that there was a prior series of games until I’d been playing for a little while, and WC3 wound up being the first RTS I remember playing.
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Apr 23, 2018 08:20
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Azzur posted:It's interesting that no one has really talked about Diablo 3 yet, given all the Blizzard games that we've woven through in our pasts. I had a roommate at one point that lived for that game. I remember watching his desk slowly pile up with cigarette ash as he played through the week. He would excitedly tell me how he paid for his half of the rent with items sold through the game. You asked about Warcraft, dude. Wouldn't have mattered anyway, I didn't play any of the Diablo games. I tried playing Titan Quest back in the day (which I'm mentioning because everyone called it "Diablo in Greek Times"), but I returned it because it wouldn't run on my computer no matter what I did (and believe me, I did a lot).
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Apr 23, 2018 08:38
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painedforever posted:You asked about Warcraft, dude. Haha, my bad. I am interested in everyone's background with the Warcraft games, but as there was a slow outpouring of responses to all of Blizzard's titles, I started wondering what Diablo and Diablo 2 were popping up, but never Diablo 3. Carry on!
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Apr 23, 2018 08:48
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My very first computer was one of these bastards, a first release IBM PS/1 hand-me-down from my brother. It ran Warlords. Street Rod. Duke Nukem 2. Even Stunts, 4-D Boxing and Jazz Jackrabbit (poorly). But it couldn't run Warcraft. My brother's new and ridiculously faster 486 could though, without any issues. Now, I was only three years old when I got the PS/1, and my parents (well, my mother, really) was a little concerned about the bloodier affair that was Warcraft compared to my current stock of games (and the fact that a certain, blue-armoured fellow from Wolfenstein 3-D gave me recurring nightmares), and she asked my brother to put a password on it to keep me from developing further mental scars. Helpfully, I had a cousin who had too much time on his hands, who managed to beat the password through sheer attrition. The password was "asphalt", by the way. Some years later, I got the 486 as well, my brother upgrading to a Pentium... Just in time for Warcraft 2! It was the bestest Christmas ever. 
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Apr 23, 2018 09:00
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I wanted to talk a little more about my family's and my infatuation with Blizzard, but I was afraid of going too far off topic. We all really enjoyed every Blizzard game on PC when we were growing up; things from Starcraft to Diablo (I still love making a pet focused druid and loving up everyone's frame rate. Hell yeah), but I could never beat a lot of the games because I was just too young, and by the time I was old enough to actually do well at them... well, WoW was a thing. I distinctly remember enjoying Diablo III for what it was though, even at the very beginning. Once again, I went Pet Witch Doctor and basically watched as all of my pets killed everything for me. It was tons of fun when everything was retooled and we could actually get gear that pertained to our class (STR ON A WITCH DOCTOR ONLY HAT!? AUGH!!!) but soon the expansion hit and Femsader was everything I ever wanted to be. But thinking back, I never actually think a lot about Blizzard anymore, and I couldn't really put my finger on why until I realized what sort of job I'm in. As an English teacher for English as a Foreign Language classes, it's sort of my job to be interested in my students' interests, in order to make them feel more inclined to talk about themselves in English. Thus a lot of times when students ask me "What's your favorite video game?" I used to say "I like Warcraft and the Sims." And I'd get blank stares until I sigh and go "I like Dragon Quest and Legend of Zelda", and their eyes brighten. Eventually after 4 years of that, I was so used to thinking of Japanese games first that I hardly ever even think about games from the US anymore. I once had someone ask me what sort of games I recommended from overseas and I literally drew a blank; I had been so busy thinking about Japanese games my students like that I had simply forgotten that Western games existed. ...That same mentality is probably bleeding over now; I know *Warcraft* exists because we're talking about it in this thread, but oh my god wait, Diablo was made by Blizzard? Holy poo poo, you're right!
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Apr 23, 2018 09:45
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Aces High posted:Yo what up fellow Warlords player Hey guys I sure love Warlords, my favourite is WARLORDS: BATTLECRY. How about you guys???? Ha ha just joking, Battlecry was an unholy mess and gently caress the people who turned our beloved turn-based strategy into that hot garbage. The old turn-based Warlords games(and not the NEW one, I think it was IV or something? It was loving terrible.) were awesome and like mainlining heroin to me. Taking the risk of sending heroes into dungeons, making custom factions(swarms of elf archers? There's your win button. Gotta love us enough instakill chances to choke a dragon), etc. it was all great. Azzur posted:It's interesting that no one has really talked about Diablo 3 yet, given all the Blizzard games that we've woven through in our pasts. I had a roommate at one point that lived for that game. I remember watching his desk slowly pile up with cigarette ash as he played through the week. He would excitedly tell me how he paid for his half of the rent with items sold through the game. Oh man, the Diablo games... I think the first Diablo game was one of the first ones I played in co-op multiplayer, and also one of the first games to actually scare me. For some reason, hearing the Butcher with his AHHHHH, FRESH MEAT, just as you opened another innocent-looking door, then coming gunning for you? That was terrifying to me as a kid, same for my co-op buddy as well, so we spent the better part of a night nailbiting, each trying to convince the other that HE had to be the one who opened the door and got chased by the Butcher. For its time, the original Diablo was a masterpiece of atmosphere, even if the actual gameplay was a bit wonky. Then came Diablo 2 and oh man, like any other Blizzard game of the era, everyone I knew had watched and rewatched the trailers and teaser-trailers and all the other content like fifty times and was incredibly hype for it and... wet fart. That's what it was, a wet fart, compared to the original. Arguably it was more solid and interesting, gameplay-wise, but the atmosphere was just gone, not to mention that holy balls did it have a lot of dead ends, character development-wise. Necromancer? Sure, breeze through the first act with INFINITE SKELETONS. Then find that strategy is completely useless a short distance into the second and especially when dealing with big bosses of any kind. On the other hand, just abandon all summons in favour of maxed Bone Spear, abandon the whole specialty of the class in fact, and you're #1. I think it took me about ten tries to actually get past the second act, somehow that was always the really dull sticking point for me, not so much the jungle as it tended to be for everyone else I knew. gently caress the jungle, though, gently caress it five times. By the point of Diablo 3, Blizzard had burnt enough bridges with me with badly-written lore, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. So once I heard about all of their weird, dumb decisions and defenses of same(I can't quite remember what it was, exactly. but the REAL MONEY AUCTION HOUSE was definitely part of it), I just dropped all interest in it and never looked back(and judging by what I've heard of the game design, writing and balance, my decision seems vindicated). My first return to any Blizzard games since then was with Overwatch and... yeah, it's okay. Got bored of it reasonably fast, though, with every match ending up feeling the same. They had a great art style going, a lot of good writing but... y'know, none of that ever had an impact on the actual game you were playing.
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Apr 23, 2018 09:55
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I liked Starcraft, but the main games I really loved were D1 and D2. D1 to my mind was perfect, and I played it over and over again. D2 wasn't as good I guess, but it was still a blast to play, and I took so many characters to at least the beginning of Hell, and even a trap assassin to finish the whole game completely. Only had a few chances to play multiplayer though, but everytime I tried multiplayer all I could wish for was a consistent group to play through the entire thing together. Never had the luxury. I loved War3 for the campaign and all the custom games, but never played ladder. Similarly, I loved Starcraft 2 campaign, and the co-op missions now are still a good enjoyment for me. I also still play HOTS. Unfortunately, D3 was a complete disaster in my eyes, and even now when I try other ARPGs all I can think is 'drat, this is nowhere as good as D2'. I did try WOW for one month, but burned out so quickly I never went back. I did try to replay W2, but wasn't good enough to finish the expansion. Maybe I should try again now that I've learned more.
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Apr 23, 2018 10:11
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Azzur posted:It's interesting that no one has really talked about Diablo 3 yet, given all the Blizzard games that we've woven through in our pasts. I had a roommate at one point that lived for that game. I remember watching his desk slowly pile up with cigarette ash as he played through the week. He would excitedly tell me how he paid for his half of the rent with items sold through the game. Oh yeah, I forgot about Diablo 3. Played both versions of it as I got it for release because I enjoyed playing D2 back then. Which is funny because I never played it long enough to actually finish it. At least not on my own. I know I did finish it in co-op with friends using one of the massive rehaul mods. But on my own I only got as far as middle point of act 3 or so. Never got that far into Diablo 1 but then it came out I was much much younger. Anyway, played D3 somewhere around launch and managed to beat it. Didn't dabble anything with the now infamous auction house other than buying one or two things for ingame gold but nothing else. Enjoyed it despite the eye rolling plot developments and kept wishing for a dialogue skip button because it was generally bad. The only exception being the occasional conversation your character would have with their companions. Now those were good. So a couple of years later I picked up the expansion and played through the extra campaign act and the adventure mode for a while before putting it down again. Didn't find much enjoyment in the gear hunt after a while. I did manage to get a really amazing combination of gear and abilities with my Wizard that turned her in a walking death beam. Not horribly effective but it was always fun to just spin around shooting the disintegration beam for no mana cost while randomly casting my other attack spells. Picked it up again during the Starcraft anniversary just to grab the pet and played for a while but with my Wizard being a bit too good almost and my original Monk I played with in the beginning now shafted due to gear issues there wasn't much urge to play again. But I enjoyed the time I had with it though. For all its fault D3 is still hugely satisfying at part and I always loved turning enemies into a bloody mist with my Monk. Funny enough D3 has kinda ruined ARPGs for me because of that as I remember replaying Torchlight 2 and just thinking "I kinda want to play Diablo 3 again" as I was playing it. Mostly because it lacked oomph in what it did which is something D3 had in spades as you butchered your way through various demons and other assorted monsters. T2 did have gibbing but it wasn't as fun with bodies sent flying everywhere from powerful hits. They just kinda exploded and that was it. Pretty sure that was the reason why I got the expansion in the first place. I think that pretty much covers all the Blizzard games I've played because I dislike competitive multiplayer which counts out a lot of the more recent titles and I never bothered about SC2 all that much. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 11:34
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If the rest of the Blizzard stable is fair game, then Warcraft was at the end route through them: started with Diablo 2, migrated to Starcraft, and from there to Warcraft 3. Gave up on Starcraft 2 after Heart of the Swarm was such a disappointment, but still play co-op a lot, mainly playing Stukov and Nova - like Warcraft 3, Starcraft LPs seem cursed on this subforum. One interesting bit of trivia about Warcraft (specifically WoW) is that it's the franchise that introduced LGBT characters to Blizzard properties. I suspect everyone reading this knows about Overwatch and Tracer, but Mists of Pandaria in 2012 actually introduced Blizzard's first canonically queer character in an extremely obscure fashion, in the form of an in-game novel that mentioned that the stable master at an outpost called the Tavern in the Mists, who's a pandaren woman, has a 'life-mate' who is also a woman. The most recent WoW expansion, Legion, added a couple more official LGBT couples to the game. One is a pair of human monks in the monk class hall, who are a tribute to a lesbian Blizzard employee who works on WoW and her wife, but also and more prominently, two night elf women involved in enchanting profession quests: one joined the Legion and became a satyr during the War of the Ancients, and one was killed and cursed as a ghost when Queen Azshara destroyed and cursed Azsuna. With a little help from the PC, the power of love between these two priestesses breaks the curses on both women, the satyr becoming a night elf again and the ghost no longer being trapped in Azsuna, and they both ascend together into what's implied to be heaven. This is the only time in Warcraft history to date that either of these curses is ever broken. Diablo and Starcraft remain entirely without any LGBT characters. Time will tell whether this will spread or if any story-prominent characters will ever be queer. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 13:55
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Charlett posted:As an English teacher for English as a Foreign Language classes, it's sort of my job to be interested in my students' interests, in order to make them feel more inclined to talk about themselves in English. Thus a lot of times when students ask me "What's your favorite video game?" I used to say "I like Warcraft and the Sims." 'Eyyyy, what up, fellow EFL Teacher.
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Apr 23, 2018 14:57
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